Devers takes shift head on
Bunts will force opponents to think
Not every bigleaguer blessed with great talent is a well-rounded baseball player. Some stick to what they do best and rely on that to get their names written on the lineup card.
Red Sox third baseman Rafael Devers, certainly among the most impressive young talents in the game, wouldn’t need to play a wellrounded game to see his name in the lineup, but he knows how to take what the pitcher and defense give him.
Facing the dreaded shift, Devers retaliated by attempting to bunt in each of
the first two games of the series vs. the Dodgers at Fenway Park. On Friday night, his 0-1 bunt went foul. The way things are going for him now, even when he fails he succeeds. He slammed the next pitch over the Green Monster for his 17th home run. On Saturday night, he pushed a bunt past the pitcher to the vacated area near third base for a single.
Every time he does that, he makes the defense think about shifting its thinking.
Some advocate banning the shift, but to do so would be to reward hitting talents for not becoming wellrounded hitters. It would punish a player like Devers, who has a chance to bunt his way to making the defense play him with a more traditional alignment. The organic approach in taming the shift would lead to better baseball.
If and only if players learn to bunt, or at least hit it the other way, the shift will go the way of toga parties. Otherwise, it’s here to stay and the boring grounder to the shortstop playing second base will loop in all of our nightmares.
After making the defense pay, Devers wore a big smile as he stood on first base. He earned it. Nice play.
Count Red Sox manager Alex Cora among those who wonders more hitters aren’t making defenses think twice about putting on the shift by dropping bunts.
“Very surprised,” Cora said. If a hitter as hot as Devers isn’t too proud bunt, or too eager to swing such a hot bat, then nobody should be immune to employing longterm thinking and taking an easy base in the process.
“In certain situations we like to see it,” Cora said of Devers bunting. “We like to see him swing the bat too. But I mean that was good to see. Got it by the pitcher. The fact that you’ve got Xander (Bogaerts) behind you and then J.D. (Martinez) also. Now you’ll see for the upcoming series they’re going to keep that third baseman there maybe on a few pitches and he maybe goes the other way against it. That was a good one.”
Bunting’s not as easy as it looks.
“A lot of guys can’t do it,” Cora said.
But many more players could get it down if they worked at the art. Or they could beat the shift by learning to shooting the ball through the empty area with a full swing.
“Maybe but at the same time it’s tough,” Cora said, noting the decline in pitches with horizontal movement. “There is not too much EastWest stuff. There are lot of fastballs up, breaking balls down. You try to manipulate the head of the bat on a breaking ball and try to go that way it might be a groundball to the pitcher. So it’s not that easy to do it.”
Young hitters learn how to launch the ball and aren’t squaring up after pumping tokens into the batting practice pitching machine.
“You don’t see them bunting on travel teams. You don’t see that,” said Cora, who then shared a conversation he had a few years ago with his college coach, retired University of Miami legend Jim Morris about, “freshman players coming in, you have to actually teach them how to play the game. It used to be out of high school you go to college, you know all the get ’em over, bunt ’em over, when to run, when not to run. But now the way the game is going, 15, 16, even 12 (years old) … they’re trying to throw hard, run fast, hit the ball out of the ballpark. So you’re not actually playing winning baseball, quote, unquote, at a young age. It is hard. It’s hard to teach these guys all that stuff. You know, go the other way, bunt a guy over, certain situations, man at second, no outs, late in games, go to the right side. They don’t do that when they’re 10, imagine when they’re 20, 21.”
Every time Devers bunts his way on base, the chances increase that some aspiring young ballplayer will go to the cages and sign up for a lesson to learn how to bunt, and with any luck the instructors, won’t faint over shock at the request and can remember that the bunt used to play an important role in baseball. Now it can play an even more important role, even if all it does is drive the shift six feet into the ground.